• Source: Bahr (poetry)

A baḥr (from Arabic بحر, lit. 'sea'; Persian: بحر; Azerbaijani: bəhr; Turkish: bahir; Urdu: بحر; Uzbek: bahr) means a meter in Arabic, Persian, Turkic and Urdu poetry. Essentially, bahr is a specific pattern, combining the arkaan of Urdu prosody that define the "length" of a sher. However, generally bahr is categorized in three classes: Short, medium, long, depending upon the length of the sher of the ghazal.
For a ghazal, since all the shers in it should be of the same bahr, determining the bahr of one sher (or even one line of the sher) is enough to determine the bahr of the entire ghazal. For example, in this ghazal of Ghalib, the length and meter of the ashaar is same throughout. In terms of the European method of scansion, the metre can be written as follows (where "x" = long or short, "u" = short, "–" = long, "u u" = one long or two short syllables):

x u – – u – u – u u –
koii ummiid bar nahiin aatii
koii suurat nazar nahiin aatii
aage aatii thii haal-e-dil pe hansii
ab kisii baat par nahiin aatii
jaanataa huun savaab-e-taa'at-o-zahad
par tabiiyat idhar nahiin aatii
hai kuchh aisii hii baat jo chup huun
varna kyaa baat kar nahiin aatii
kaabaa kis muunh se jaaoge 'Ghaalib'
sharm tumako magar nahiin aatii
The ghazal above is written in a bahr called: khafiif musaddas makhbuun mahzuuf maqtu (Meter G8). This is a ten-syllable bahr and by the standards of Urdu poetry, is a chotii (small) bahr.
As with the scansion of Persian poetry, a syllable such as miid or baat consisting of a long vowel plus consonant, or sharm consisting of a short vowel and two consonants, is "overlong", and counts as a long syllable + a short one.
In Urdu prosody, unlike Persian, any final long vowel can be shortened as the metre requires, for example, in the word kaabaa in the last verse above.




Taqti


Taqti is the process of breaking down words of all verses of a ghazal or a poem into fundamental syllables, calculating their weights (vazn), and checking if all verses have a consistent meter. For example, the word jaanisaar can be broken down into four syllables: jaa, ni, saa and r. The weight of jaa is 2, ni is 1, saa is 2 and r is 1, thus making the weight of the word jaanisaar 2121. Rekhta has developed a free online tool (Rekhta Taqti) that can be used to identify the bahr of any given ghazal or sher.




Types of bahr


There exist many bahrs, but mainly there are 19 bahrs used in Urdu poetry. These bahrs are further distributed in different types, but they are not described here. The names are:

baHr-e-rajaz
baHr-e-ramal
baHr-e-baseet
baHr-e-taweel
baHr-e-kaamil
baHr-e-mutadaarik
baHr-e-hazaj
baHr-e-mushaakil
baHr-e-madeed
baHr-e-mutaqaarib
baHr-e-mujtas
baHr-e-muZaara
baHr-e-munsareH
baHr-e-waafer
baHr-e-qareeb
baHr-e-saree
baHr-e-khafeef
baHr-e-jadeed
baHr-e-muqtaZeb




References






Bibliography


Deo, Ashwini; Kiparsky, Paul (2011). "Poetries in Contact: Arabic, Persian, and Urdu". In Maria-Kristina Lotman and Mihhail Lotman ed. Proceedings of International Conference on Frontiers in Comparative Metrics, Estonia, pp. 147–173.
Pritchett, Frances W. (1993). "Orient Pearls Unstrung: The Quest for Unity in the Ghazal". Edebiyât vol. NS 4, pp. 119–135.
Pritchett, Frances. "A Desert Full of Roses - The Urdu Ghazals of Mirza Assadullah Khan Ghalib".
Thiesen, Finn (1982). A Manual of Classical Persian Prosody, with chapters on Urdu, Karakhanidic and Ottoman prosody. Wiesbaden.

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